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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27896929">Deal with the Devil</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/debian/pseuds/debian'>debian</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Hannibal (TV), Supernatural</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Episode: s01e17 Hell House, Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 17:13:49</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,114</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27896929</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/debian/pseuds/debian</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>TattleCrime's supernatural feature was going to blow the other blogs out of the water.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Dean Winchester &amp; Sam Winchester</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Deal with the Devil</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thanks to <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/zipegs/">zipegs</a> for beta reading. Some dialogue is borrowed from the episode.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>TattleCrime’s supernatural feature of the month was not the smashing success Freddie had hoped it would be. Her readers typically salivated over grizzly murders, so inhuman you could hardly believe they were true, but when they actually <em>were</em> inhuman, the hits tanked. Quadruple digits. It was only a matter of time before another crime blog ran a story about how Freddie Lounds was losing her edge, and there was nothing that killed a site faster than an accusation like that. Freddie knew—she had a few murders under her own belt.</p><p>So, the supernatural feature would have to go, or it would have to go big. She had gambled on a stub of a story on the so-called Hell House earlier that month, and the updates would have to deliver. The lead had come from an anonymous tip submitted to her website, which had historically been a mixed bag of reliability, but something about the story had rung true to Freddie. It wasn’t <em>cheap</em> to go off an anonymous, unsubstantiated lead—it was just business—but a paltry tip was no substitute for the color of a real investigation. She gave herself until the next month’s feature was due to appear to save the Hell House story, no matter how many updates it took. Freddie had no doubts in her ability to breathe life into this story. By the time she was done with it, this month’s supernatural feature would blow the other blogs out of the water. </p><p>That was why Freddie found herself in a small-town diner on a Saturday night, hundreds of miles from home. She sipped at a cup of coffee, hunched over her laptop in a corner booth, reading up on the town but mostly listening to the locals around her. </p><p>There was a lot to be learned by eavesdropping. The night before, Freddie had overheard a pack of teenagers discussing a story with too much fear and reverence in their voices to be lying. They had broken into an old, abandoned house—the Hell House—and discovered a girl, hanged to death in the basement. A girl who had disappeared in the time it took them to run, screaming, and call for the police. The teenagers had seen a dozen different religious symbols and fresh blood before the vanishing dead girl—this was the real thing.</p><p>The teenagers didn’t come back tonight; there probably wasn't much more she could learn from them, anyway, and Freddie was considering continuing her research in the relative comfort of her motel room when two out-of-towners came into the diner. She could tell they were out-of-towners because they stuck out just like she did, moving a little too fast for this slow, sleepy town. They sat down at a booth not too far from her, and one of the guys ordered, grinning broadly at the waitress in her tight top all the while. He had an accent that fit in around here a lot better than Freddie’s, but there was something about him, still.</p><p>“Just passing through,” the man said, handing his menu over to the waitress.</p><p>If the scared kids weren’t enough, now Freddie really knew the Hell House was the real thing. She had competition.</p><p>---</p><p>The next morning, Freddie set off for the house with a camera hanging around her neck. The money shot—the dark and grizzly photo that would make the rounds with the article and hook people in—would have to be taken at night, for sure. But there was nothing like daylight for some investigating.</p><p>Freddie climbed the hill up to the house, her shoes squelching in the muddy grass. To say the house had fallen into disrepair would be generous—the wood was rotting on all sides, turning the exterior a deep, earthy brown, and windows with any remaining glass to speak of were few and far between. The door was already open, looking like it had been forced. As Freddie neared the house, she heard voices and loud footfalls inside. She moved the door a couple of inches as she slipped past, hoping it wouldn’t creak.</p><p>“I don’t know, Sam,” Freddie heard as she tip-toed through the hallway. It was the guy from the diner. “You know I hate to agree with authority figures of any kind, but the cops may be right about this one.”</p><p>“Yeah, maybe.”</p><p>Freddie kept walking down the hall, digging in her bag for her audio recorder, but as her fingers closed around it, she stepped on a loose floorboard. The resulting creak was more than loud enough to give her position away. Freddie swore, and looked up to find herself at gunpoint.</p><p>“Well, hello there,” she said, because this was not the first time she had had a gun pointed at her. That was no reason to forget her manners.</p><p>“What the hell are you doing here?” one of the guys asked. He must be Sam, Freddie thought.</p><p>Diner Guy lowered his gun, and gestured for Sam to do the same. “Now, Sam, that’s no way to talk to a lady.”</p><p>Freddie ignored him, and addressed Sam. “I could ask you the same thing. This is a crime scene.”</p><p>“Nah, for it to be a crime scene, there’d have to be a body,” Diner Guy said, automatically. Then he took a good look at her, making no effort to hide an exaggerated once-over. He met her eyes. “I’m Dean.”</p><p>Dean was undeniably striking, all sharp angles and dark eyes, but he was attractive in a way that managed to be smug more than anything else. Freddie barely managed to avoid rolling her eyes at his whole shtick. But Dean held out his hand, and Freddie had no choice but to take it.</p><p>“Freddie.”</p><p>“Hold on a second, Freddie Lounds?” Sam said. She nodded, and he grinned bashfully, reminding Freddie of a golden retriever. “Freddie. When I read your byline, I just assumed you were some guy living in his mom’s basement. I'm Sam, by the way.”</p><p>Freddie shook his hand too, this time with feeling. There wasn’t anything <em>wrong</em> with looking like a golden retriever. “You’d be surprised how often I get that.”</p><p>“We’re huge fans of your blog,” Dean said, glancing between them. “Especially the supernatural section. You ran a story about this house last month, didn’t you?”</p><p>Freddie nodded. “I take it you boys are here to investigate the same thing I am.”</p><p>“Yeah, something like that,” Sam said.</p><p>Freddie’s initial assessment of these guys had been much too generous—they were definitely not competition, maybe not even journalists. She slipped past them and into the room they had been looking around in, powering on her camera and taking in the space as she photographed it: bare concrete floor and rotting walls covered in spray-painted symbols, just like the teenagers at the diner had described. A few of the symbols were familiar—an upside-down cross, a pentagram, a six-pointed star—but more of them Freddie had never seen before. She paid special attention to these. </p><p>“So, you ever seen a ghost before?” Dean asked her as she worked.</p><p>Freddie smiled. “I’ve seen a lot of things you wouldn’t believe,” she said, and that was the truth. Maybe she wasn’t a seasoned ghost hunter, but human beings were capable of atrocities Freddie never would have dreamed of before starting TattleCrime; there wasn’t much she couldn’t believe. She had never seen a ghost before, but that just meant she hadn’t looked hard enough. Anything could be found if you knew how to look. And Freddie knew how.</p><p>Finished taking pictures, she turned over her shoulder to where Sam and Dean still stood, in the doorway to the room, not quite seeming to know how to act now that they had company. “Want to compare notes?”</p><p>Sam looked at Dean like he was asking permission, and Dean shrugged. “Alright, you first.”</p><p>“Most of what I know is in the article,” Freddie hedged. She wasn’t in the habit of giving away her hard-won information on spec, but she could spare a couple of details without losing her exclusive, and this seemed like a trade that would fall heavily in her favor. “I do have some corrections—no one named Mordechai ever lived there. Our man is probably Martin Murdock, owner of this house in the thirties.” She left out the fact that he had only had sons, not the six daughters of legend, and probably never killed anybody. That wouldn’t be making it into the article, and if Sam and Dean were worth their salt, they would double-check her research anyway.</p><p>“Huh,” Dean said.</p><p>“And you?” Freddie asked, taking out her recorder. These guys really were amateurs; they hadn’t even written anything down.</p><p>“I hit up the police station this morning,” Dean said. “No matching missing persons. It’s like that girl never existed.” He turned to Sam and said in an undertone, “Dude, come on, we did our digging, man. This one's a bust, alright. For all we know, this TattleCrime chick made up the whole thing.”</p><p>Freddie rolled her eyes, but otherwise pretended not to have heard. If these guys wanted to get out of the way for her, she had no complaints.</p><p>Sam nodded at Dean, then turned to her. “We should probably get going,” he said, having the decency to sound somewhat apologetic. “Nice to meet you, though.”</p><p>Freddie stuck around to take a few more pictures, and then headed back to the motel. She’d do some more research, maybe come back the next day. This one wasn’t a bust; it couldn’t be.</p><p>---</p><p>Freddie awoke at dawn to the sounds of a dead body being called in. She had fallen asleep hunched over her notes and the police scanner, and her muscles ached as she yawned, stretching widely. Then she heard where the body had been reported, and she was wide awake. Freddie grabbed her keys and her camera and sped to the Hell House.</p><p>She arrived at the house to find half a dozen emergency vehicles, lights flashing, and paramedics carrying a body on a stretcher down the hill. Freddie half-hid herself in the brush and took out her camera. Shoot first, ask questions later.</p><p>Freddie crept closer as the police converged on the house, the early-morning haze blurring the edges of the crime scene, lending mystery to even its mundane details as she captured them with a click of her camera. A coffee cup balancing on top of a cruiser, heavy bootprints in the mud, an officer’s hat that had fallen on the grass in his haste to get to the house. Crime scenes were the same more than they were different. Ordered, to make up for something so painfully chaotic as murder.</p><p>At the bottom of the hill stood Sam and Dean, talking to a man who must have lived nearby. The three of them were hazy, too, in their sameness—locals talking in circles around such an act of violence that had been performed in their own backyard, hoping to make sense of it. Murder was supposed to happen on the silver screen, or in other towns, but not here; it couldn’t happen here. It was an impossible thought to think about your own hometown. Seeing murder up close turned most people’s world topsy-turvy, but she’d noticed that they could forget about it, after a while, or at least rationalize it as a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Not Freddie. She had been told that it was anomalous to take such satisfaction in this particular kind of reckoning, but she couldn’t help it.</p><p>Freddie ducked behind another bush, hoping she hadn’t been seen. She clicked on her recorder in time to hear the man tell Sam and Dean that a girl had hanged herself in the house, a straight-A student with a full ride to UT.</p><p>“What do you think?” Sam asked when the man had walked away, shaking his head.</p><p>The sun had cleared the horizon now, and the haze lifted. The two of them were upset, that much was clear, but Freddie saw more of herself reflected in their demeanor than the small-town cops.</p><p>Dean looked past Sam, squinting up at the Hell House through the morning light. “I think maybe we missed something.”</p><p>Freddie allowed herself a moment of satisfaction from her hiding place. She hadn’t missed anything. She never did.</p><p>---</p><p>Sam and Dean were staying at the same motel Freddie was. It was the only motel in town, so they must have known it too; Freddie made sure to stay a car or two behind their shiny Chevy Impala when she tailed them back to the Hell House that night. She waited for them to go in, then pulled up right at the bottom of the hill in her Jeep and killed the engine. There was no point going in there if she could learn from these two idiots—Freddie wasn’t scared of a crime scene, or a “haunted” house; she was just pragmatic.</p><p>Besides, between the photos she’d taken yesterday and the body found today, she wouldn’t need any more proof to sell this story. It was a murder now, and she knew how to sell murder. Freddie made notes while she waited in the car, trying out a few different headlines. <em>The Haunting of Hell House</em>. No, that was obvious, cheap even for TattleCrime. <em>Hell on Earth</em>, maybe.</p><p>Then she heard gunshots, and yells coming from the house. It was dark, and she was far away, but Freddie reflexively reached for her camera. Maybe with the flash… </p><p>Sam and Dean burst through the door, tumbling down the stairs. They scrambled to their feet and kept running, guns out, kicking up mud behind them, not even pausing to look over their shoulders until they’d put fifty yards between them and that house. They looked, well. They looked like they’d seen a ghost.</p><p>The two of them stood there catching their breath at the bottom of the hill, facing the house as if something might still run out of there after them. Freddie watched for a moment, then opened her car door. Dean turned his gun to the noise.</p><p>“We have got to stop meeting like this,” Freddie said, walking around to the other side of her car where Sam and Dean stood.</p><p>Dean put his gun away, but he didn’t look happy about it. “In the immortal words of my brother, what the hell are you doing here?”</p><p>Brothers, huh. Freddie wouldn’t have guessed.</p><p>She ignored the question. “What happened in there? I can think of a few things that would make you run screaming.”</p><p>“Why should we tell you?” Dean crossed his arms over his chest.</p><p>“You had no problem telling me before,” Freddie said. Before Dean could interrupt and complain that she’d followed them here, or something else irrelevant, she added, “And you owe me. I broke this story; without me, you wouldn’t even be here, waving your guns around for this whole Ghostbusters act.”</p><p>“She’s got a point,” Sam said.</p><p>“Alright,” Dean said. “Alright, I’ll tell you, but—we’re not Ghostbusters. We hunt this kind of thing, for real. We saw Mordechai’s ghost in there, pumped him full of rock salt, and it did a whole lot of nothing. That’s what gets two hunters to run screaming.”</p><p>Freddie blinked, trying to appear unfazed. She tried to think of this as no different than her usual process of expanding on a story even if she didn’t quite believe it was true, but it was becoming difficult not to get caught in the weeds, to distinguish between legend and reality. That mattered to her, even if the distinction might not make it to her readers.</p><p>“Mordechai’s ghost? No Mordechai ever lived here,” she said.</p><p>“It was Mordechai’s ghost,” Dean insisted. “And the damn thing wouldn’t die.”</p><p>If Dean was telling the truth, that meant there was less to distinguish between legend and reality than she’d thought. The idea was nothing short of delicious. She hoped it was true. “Why should I believe you?”</p><p>Dean shrugged. “What do I look like, an evangelist? Believe it or not, makes no difference to me. You want in?”</p><p>Freddie was never going to be able to say no to that. She returned to her motel room to take notes on everything that had happened, but not before making plans to meet with Sam and Dean the next day. There was more to the story; that much was clear, and these two seemed to be worth their salt after all. No pun intended.</p><p>---</p><p>Freddie knocked on Sam and Dean’s motel room the next morning with three cups of coffee. Dean answered the door, and Sam sat at a table, buried up to his elbows in papers and hunched over a laptop. Freddie cleared a space for her own laptop and sat down across from him. She had an internet browser open in one window, and a word processor open in another. Any more research would just be color; Freddie already had the material for another article or two.</p><p>They worked in silence for a while before Dean sat up on the bed. All he appeared to have done in this time was doodle on the motel pad—Freddie didn’t exactly see how this was a fair distribution of labor.</p><p>“What the hell is this symbol?” Dean said. “It's bugging the hell outta me. This whole damn job's bugging me. I thought the legend said Mordechai only goes after chicks.”</p><p>“It does,” Sam said.</p><p>“All right. Well, I mean, that explains why he went after you, but why me?” Dean flashed a smirk at Freddie, which she did not reciprocate.</p><p>“Hilarious,” Sam said. “The legend also says he hung himself, but did you see those slit wrists?”</p><p>“What's up with that? And the axe, too. I mean, ghosts are usually pretty strict, right? Following the same patterns over and over?”</p><p>This was starting to sound familiar. Freddie pulled up the story she had posted a couple of days ago, which already had thousands of hits. She read aloud, “They say Mordechai Murdock was really a Satanist who chopped up his victims with an axe before slitting his own wrists. Now he's imprisoned in the house for eternity.”</p><p>Sam frowned, scanning the stacks of paper around him. “Where’d you read that?”</p><p>“I didn’t read it. I wrote it.”</p><p>Sam tapped away at his computer, and then he was reading from the TattleCrime article too. “It’s all here,” he said, shaking his head, and Dean got up to read over his shoulder. “Every last detail.”</p><p>“You holding out on us, Freddie? Where did you hear that from?” Dean demanded.</p><p>Freddie shrugged. “Nowhere. The details were lacking, so I... embellished. Nobody wants to read about a guy named Martin who had two sons and died peacefully in his sleep.”</p><p>“That’s not right,” Dean said. “You’re just posting lies.”</p><p>“People don’t read TattleCrime for the truth.” Freddie shut her laptop. “They read it for the story, and I write a sensational story.”</p><p>Dean didn’t look happy with that, but he didn’t argue with her anymore, either. He looked down at the symbol he had been drawing, one Freddie recognized from the walls of the house, and then he stood up straight.</p><p>“Freddie, where’d you get the first tip for this story?” Dean asked.</p><p>She told him about the anonymous submission, and he fumed.</p><p>“Where is this going?” Sam asked.</p><p>“I don’t know,” Dean said. “But I think I might have just figured out where it all started.”</p><p>---</p><p>Where it all started was, apparently, a record store. Dean shouldered open the door, making the bells jingle, loud. A kid looked up from where he sat at the counter, and Dean strode over towards him. Freddie half expected him to grab the kid by the scruff of his neck, but Dean changed direction and made for a box of records instead, started looking through them.</p><p>“Hey, Craig,” he said. “Remember us?”</p><p>Craig shrank in his seat. “Guys, look, I'm really not in the mood to answer any more of your questions, okay?”</p><p>“Oh, don't worry. We're just here to buy an album, that's all.” Dean reached the end of the box and started on another. He really was looking for something, rifling through the boxes with a manic energy Freddie would hate to have directed toward her. Then he found it.</p><p>“You know,” he said, ostensibly to Sam and Freddie, holding a record as he walked towards the counter, “I couldn't figure out what that symbol was, and then I realized that it doesn't mean anything. It's the logo for the Blue Öyster Cult.” Dean flipped over the record, and there it was: one of the symbols Freddie had photographed, nestled in the center of a busy album cover. He turned to Craig. “Tell me, Craig, you into BOC? Or just scaring the hell out of people? Now, why don’t you tell us about that house. Without lying through your ass this time.”</p><p>Craig told. All of the spray-painted symbols had been painted by him and his cousin Dana, lifted from theology textbooks and the Web and album covers, apparently; all of the legend of Mordechai Murdock had been cooked up in a drunken evening. “I told a few friends, who told other people. And I did send it in to that Freddie Lounds guy’s stupid website, but I didn’t think he would publish it! Everything just took on a life of its own. I mean I— I thought it was funny at first, but now that girl's dead! It was just a joke, you know. I mean, none of it was real, we made the whole thing up. I swear!”</p><p>If this got out, it would do a lot more damage to TattleCrime’s reputation than a low hit count. She wouldn’t let it get out.</p><p>Freddie walked up to Craig, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “Freddie Lounds guy, owner of that stupid website.” She didn’t extend her hand. “So you were the anonymous tipster. I’d pictured someone with more of a spine.”</p><p>Craig squirmed in his seat. “I’m sorry, lady, really.”</p><p> “I don’t look fondly on the sources of false tips.”</p><p>Freddie could have happily stuck around for more, but it would only have been recreational. Craig didn’t seem like the type to tell, and Sam and Dean were already turning to leave behind her, having gotten their answer. She fell into step with them in time to hear Dean say, “If none of it was real, how the hell do you explain Mordechai?”</p><p>Sam didn’t answer, and neither did Freddie. They walked to their cars in silence.</p><p>---</p><p>If creating a monster was as simple as going off of a bad tip, TattleCrime would be full of fabrications come true. No, there had to be something more to the Hell House; Freddie knew it, and Sam and Dean did too. It was back to the motel room again to puzzle over their research.</p><p>Sam dug into his stack of books, and Freddie pulled up TattleCrime. She read over the first article she’d posted about the Hell House, biting her lip. Then she checked the hit count of the most recent article. It was off the charts. TattleCrime hadn’t seen this much traffic since Freddie was covering the Chesapeake Ripper, and that had had full-size banners of world-class blood and gore, photos she’d had to trespass and elbow her way into getting. The Hell House story had practically been dropped into her lap, a product of being in the right place at the right time.</p><p>Sam looked up from an old book. “What if Mordechai was a Tulpa?”</p><p>“A Tulpa?” Freddie and Dean said in unison. Dean grinned at her, and Freddie wrinkled her nose.</p><p>“Yeah, a Tibetan thought form,” Sam said. “There was this incident in Tibet in 1915. Group of monks visualized a golem in their heads. They meditated on it so hard they brought the thing to life, out of thin air.”</p><p>“So?” Dean said.</p><p>“That was twenty monks,” Freddie said, catching on. She pulled up her hit counts and angled the laptop towards Sam and Dean. “Imagine what ten thousand web surfers could do.”</p><p>“Exactly.” Sam nodded. “Craig sends in the tip about Mordechai, you write about it on TattleCrime, with some <em>embellishments</em>”—he put this word in scare quotes—“and now there are countless people all believing in the bastard.”</p><p>Dean crossed his arms. “Now, wait a second. Are you trying to tell me that just because people believe in Mordechai, he's real?”</p><p>“I don’t know, maybe,” Sam said.</p><p>They both looked to her, and Freddie shrugged. Magical powers hadn’t exactly been included in the domain name purchase, but if she were going to limit herself to things she had known to be true before this story, Freddie would have long since gone home by now. </p><p>Dean pursed his lips and said, “You know, most people have a lot harder time believing in this stuff. You sure you’ve never seen a ghost before?”</p><p>It sounded like he meant to ask a different question, so she answered that one. “The existence of truth is a lie we all tell ourselves. The fact is, facts can be interpreted in many different ways.” It wasn’t such a jump from the typical editorial attitude of TattleCrime towards the truth. “Reality is what we all agree to believe in. My readers believe that the Hell House is haunted, so it is.”</p><p>Freddie didn’t quite get the sense that Dean believed her, but that was fine—they were even. Anyway, he let it go.</p><p>They turned their attention back to the computer, and sure enough, the Tibetan spirit sigil was among the photos that Freddie had posted in her article. Sam said, “I bet Craig and his cousin painted this, not even knowing what it was. That sigil has been used for centuries, concentrating meditative thoughts like a magnifying glass. So people are on the TattleCrime website, staring at the symbol, thinking about Mordechai... I mean, I don't know, but it might be enough to bring a Tulpa to life.”</p><p>“That would explain why he keeps changing,” Dean said. “And why the rock salt didn’t work. He’s not a traditional spirit.” He got up, and paced once across the room. “Okay, so, why don’t we just get this spirit sigil thing off the wall?”</p><p>“Well, it’s not that simple,” Sam said, eyes following his finger down a page of the book. “You see, once Tulpas are created, they take on a life of their own.”</p><p>Dean turned to Freddie. “Okay, Miss TattleCrime,” he said, clapping his hands. “You have to write another article. Tell the truth, say some kid made up the whole thing, and Mordechai’s ghost'll be gone for good."</p><p>“You want me to write an article exposing my own feature as a hoax? I don’t think you get how this works.” Freddie saw no reason not to walk out of this room right now. If Mordechai really was a Tulpa, he was a ghost that became any morbid thing she could dream up—this was a goldmine. And a guaranteed exclusive, dropped right into her lap.</p><p>“Okay, maybe not that,” Sam said, placating. “Can’t you say that Mordechai’s spirit is finally at rest?”</p><p>They were still not getting it. “Why on Earth would I do that? What’s in it for me?”</p><p>Dean glared at her. “I don’t know, how about saving human lives?”</p><p>“I’m a journalist, not a brooding and self-sacrificing ghost hunter. I don’t have any kind of obligation with my writing. Mordechai’s spirit at rest doesn’t sell.”</p><p>“Doesn’t sell.” Dean snorted. “Yeah, that whole ‘no obligation’ thing went out the window once your lies started coming true.”</p><p>Freddie said nothing. There was never any point in arguing about ethics; she would listen to his lecture and then go home and do what she always did. Freddie’s fingers already itched for her keyboard, ideas for Mordechai’s grotesque backstory bouncing around her brain.</p><p>Sam put a hand on her shoulder, too tightly to feel casual. Freddie stiffened.</p><p>He said, "Look, okay. What about next month's feature? You don't want to be writing about Hell House forever, do you?"</p><p>"Get to the point," Freddie said, shifting under his grip. No, she didn't want to be writing about the Hell House forever, but that was journalism—you squeezed all that you could out of whatever was hot at that moment, and only once that well dried up did you think about the next big scoop. Besides, it wasn't like they could do anything about it.</p><p>Sam didn’t move his hand from Freddie’s shoulder, only tightened his grip, and when he spoke, it was painfully earnest. "Run a story about Mordechai at rest, and you'll be drowning in leads for next month's supernatural column. And the month after that, as long as you want."</p><p>"I don't understand." She looked between him and Dean, who’d seemed just as puzzled as she was, but now grinned at Sam, like he'd caught on.</p><p>"I told you," Dean said. "We hunt this kind of thing, all over. Any place there's a monster under the bed, you can be the first to know."</p><p>"What, you want me to follow you around the country to chronicle the adventures of Sam and Dean, macho ghost hunters? I don't think so."</p><p>Dean shrugged. "No need to follow us around. We do carry cell phones."</p><p>"And you don't have to mention us by name," Sam added. "We'd prefer if you didn't, actually."</p><p>Freddie stared at them in disbelief. If this was really what they were offering—if there was no catch— No. This was too good to be true. There had to be a catch. "All this to put Mordechai's spirit at rest?"</p><p>Dean shrugged. "Whatever it takes. Sometimes it’s a shotgun full of rock salt, other times it’s a deal with the devil."</p><p>Freddie had been called worse. She took out her laptop, and got to writing.</p><p>---</p><p>Excerpt from TattleCrime.com, entry dated 03/30/2006</p>
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  <p>It may shock you to learn this, Readers, but after considerable research and investigation, I have uncovered the solution to this small town’s ghastly problem: Mordechai Murdock is camera-shy. Yes, after being forced to sit still for one too many family portraits as a boy, there is nothing that makes old Mordechai quake in his incorporeal boots like the sight of a camera. I have shined a light on evil before and had it reflected right back at me, but this time, a little light was all Mordechai needed to be put to rest. (Flash, that is.)</p>
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